Kurt Beals

Chad Post on The Country Road: I don’t remember seeing a lot of coverage for this book when it first came out, which is both strange and disappointing. Her writing is weird in that way that a lot of literary readers and reviewers seem to enjoy. Robert Musil called her a “genius.” There are blurbs on the book jacket by Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, and Hermann Hesse. Kurt Beals won a PEN Heim Translation Award for this….

Michael Hofmann writes: “What Ullmann has to say to us is somehow exemplary, uncomfortable, difficult, long-buried; it is from our midst, but also slightly from above, and also from below. It refuses distance, and in its designs on us doesn’t mind changing angle, direction, and even plane. […] We come away from her, as she dazzlingly puts it (and she is absolutely right!), ‘greatly enriched but slightly diminished.” The New York Review of Books

My translation of Regina Ullmann, The Country Road, from New Directions.
Recipient of a 2014 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant.
(For some reason this WordPress format doesn’t display links in blog posts — weird, right? — so click on the title to see the post with links.)
Read the story “Strawberries” and my introduction on the PEN website.
Read the story “The Mouse” and my introduction in Two Lines Online (2010).
Read the story “The Christmas Visit” in Little Star Weekly (subscription required)

“German-language literature, from Rilke to Thomas Mann, has often merged psychological landscapes with the natural world, but women have been underrepresented—or undertranslated. Enter Swiss protomodernist Ullmann, whose unclassifiable and deeply original 1921 collection has undergone a triumphant translation (the first in English) by Beals.” Read the whole review here.